Adobe

Adobe first introduced the XMP standard as part of the Adobe Acrobat software product. Since then, the XMP standard has been widely adopted.

XMP ecosystem

XMP defines a metadata model that can be used with any defined set of metadata items. XMP also defines particular schemas for basic properties useful for recording the history of a resource as it passes through multiple processing steps, from being photographed, scanned, or authored as text, through photo editing steps (such as cropping or color adjustment), to assembly into a final image. XMP allows each software program or device along the way to add its own information to a digital resource, which can then be retained in the final digital file.

XMP is most commonly serialized and stored using a subset of the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is in turn expressed in XML.

Advantages of XMP

XMP has the following advantages over other encoding standards and schemata:

  • XMP-based metadata is very powerful and fine-grained.
  • XMP lets you have multiple values for one property.
  • XMP has standardized encoding, which lets you easily exchange metadata.
  • XMP is extensible. You can add addtional information into your assets.

Extensible

The XMP standard is designed to be extensible, allowing you to add custom types of metadata into the XMP data. EXIF, on the other hand, does not - it has a fixed list of properties that cannot be extended.

NOTE
XMP generally does not allow binary data types to be embedded. To carry binary data in XMP, for example, thumbnail images, they must be encoded in an XML-friendly format such as Base64.